Setup Considerations: Multiple Institutions

Administrator Guide

You can use this topic to help make decisions when planning your configuration for a tenant with multiple institutions. It explains:

Why to set it up.

How it fits into the rest of Workday.

Downstream impacts and cross-product interactions.

Security requirements and business process configurations.

Questions and limitations to consider before implementation.

Refer to detailed task instructions for full configuration details.

What It Is

You can enable collaboration and resource sharing across multiple institutions when you set them up on a single tenant.

Institutions can be colleges, universities, or other institutions of higher education. Institutions aren’t campuses, academic levels, or other characteristics within a singular college or university.

Business Benefits

When you operate multiple institutions with distinct missions and populations within the same tenant, you can:

Share resources. Example: Staff members who work in more than 1 institution at a time.

Standardize processing and security practices across the institutions.

Create a consistent experience for students who attend more than 1 institution.

Easily generate system-wide statistics and reports.

Use Cases

Multiple institutions under the identity of a single organization or brand.

A statewide system with multiple institutions, such as community colleges within the Board of Regents system.

A consortium agreement between completely distinct institutions that enables them to collaborate and share resources.

Questions to Consider

Questions	Considerations
What is the academic structure of your system?	You can set up your system and institutions in Workday. See: Concept: Academic Structure. A system is an academic unit that’s superior to all your institutions. Examples: Consortiums, umbrella organizations, brand identities, or governing boards. You designate existing academic units as institutions. When you designate an academic unit as an institution, some functionality changes. Example: Academic units can share financial aid award items, while institutions need their own set of financial aid award items. Institutions can roll up to: Your system. A superior academic unit that rolls up to your system. Your institutions can have 1 or more academic units. These academic units can be colleges, departments, faculties, or other organizations within a school.
How much control does your system have over individual institutions?	Some configurations in Workday are on a tenant level, while others are on an institution level. You can use institution level configurations, such as policies and academic calendars, to enable variability and independence among institutions. You can: Copy the same configurations to all institutions within the system. Have the system determine some configurations, and each institution determine other configurations. Enable institutions to determine their own configurations without input from the system.
What are the relevant regulatory requirements around data sharing and separation across your institutions?	Systems with multiple institutions need to adhere to data sharing regulations, such as FERPA requirements. Using role-based security in Workday can help you ensure compliance. The regulations and system policies you need to follow can affect how you configure your tenant. Examples: Financial aid packaging strategies, and admissions criteria for institutions that compete with each other.
What security access do employees need?	You can control the level of access that staff and faculty members have within their home institution and other institutions. You can grant access that: Limits their access to only a single institution. Example: Teaching assistants can only access student records from the same institution as the course they teach. Enables them to access multiple institutions. Example: An academic advising office where academic advisors can advise students from different multiple institutions. Enables access to all information within each institution. Example: An administrator who applies system-level configurations to each institution.

Recommendations

For efficiency, we recommend that you use a system-first approach when you set up your tenant. By determining the shared configurations first, you save time when setting up configurations for individual institutions.

Example: Your system defines the setup configurations and institutions implement those configurations with the appropriate customizations.

Example: Create business processes at a system level for institutions to copy. When institutions configure their own business processes, they only need to update the missing configurations instead of creating business processes from scratch.

Requirements

Your tenant must include the Workday products currently in use by your system, such as Workday Human Capital Management and Financial Management.

Your tenant also needs institutions that:

Fall under the same umbrella organization.

You configured as separate companies in Workday.

Adhere to strict security constraints, as required by FERPA regulations.

Have different federal school codes. Example: OPEID and Branch codes.

Award federal financial aid per institution.

Additionally, each institution in your tenant needs to:

Be separate legal entities as defined by the government.

Complete independent federal and state reporting at the institution level.

Provide students with an account for every institution that they’re enrolled in.

Matriculate students before they can enroll in courses within that institution.

Prevent registrars at other institutions from viewing course work taken at your institution.

Confer degrees by each institution.

Before implementation, you also need to identify the students who attended more than 1 institution and plan on how to compile these records under 1 person record. This includes students:

Who are active or inactive. Their worker record should also fall under the person record.

With historical academic records. These records fall under a historical student record.

Limitations

Tenants with multiple institutions can’t operate as a single school. You can configure multiple institutions within a system to interact at various points, but they can’t operate like a single institution. Example: Students from institutions within the Board of Regents can take courses at other institutions within this system when you configure each institution to:

Enable student recruiting, admissions, and matriculation at multiple institutions.

Help students initiate transfer credit to receive credit at their home institution.

Tenant Setup

From the related actions menu of an academic unit, access the

Edit Institution Designation of Academic Unit

task to create institutions for your tenant. When your tenant contains more than 1 institution, Workday considers it to be a multi-institution tenant.

Security

Configure the Set Up: Institution Designation
domain and security policy in the Academic Foundation functional area to enable the appropriate users to designate academic units as institutions.

When you configure security groups in a tenant with multiple institutions, we recommend that you:

Set up security groups with constrained roles, enabling you to configure how much access users can have, and protect your institutions from unauthorized access. Examples: Registrars, bursars, and financial aid directors.

Assign a limited number of employees to unconstrained roles. These security groups have system-level access. Examples: Security Administrator, Business Process Administrator, and Calculations Administrator.

Business Processes

You can configure business processes to have shared configurations across all institutions or at the institution level. Institution-specific business processes can require additional security configuration.

Some business processes must be institution-specific. Example: Financial aid business processes must be independent across institutions.

Reporting

You can use the

Find Academic Unit Level Configuration

report to view all the academic units in your tenant, including the ones designated as institutions. You can reference this report as you build the academic structure of your system.

When you create reports, consider consolidating data across multiple institutions into 1 report to support robust consistent reporting.

Integrations

When you build integrations, consider:

When you can share information on an institution or system level. Examples: Tax reporting and data warehouses.

Which integrations can be standardized and consolidated across institutions.

Which existing third-party services you can consolidate or retain in your system. Example: Online payment processors.

Creating separate financial aid integrations for each institution in your tenant.

Connections and Touchpoints


Universal IDs	Universal IDs enable you to create the same ID for students, employees, and employees who currently attend your institutions. Universal IDs can also help you manage individuals with multiple roles at different institutions.
Financial Aid	Configure and secure award items that require loan applications by institution. Example: PLUS loans and alternative loans. Having these award items configured for specific academic units might lead to unexpected results. If you want users to be able to package financial aid for students, assign them to a role that at least has View access to student awards.

Universal IDs enable you to create the same ID for students, employees, and employees who currently attend your institutions. Universal IDs can also help you manage individuals with multiple roles at different institutions.

Workday offers a Touchpoints Kit with resources to help you understand configuration relationships in your tenant. Learn more about the Workday Touchpoints Kit on Workday Community.